Recruiters spend about seven seconds on a first pass of your CV. Most of that time lands on one block: your work experience. If that section reads like a job description copied from the company intranet, you have already lost the seven seconds.
This is the part of the CV people get wrong most often. Not because they lack experience, but because they describe it as a set of responsibilities rather than a record of what they actually changed.
Lead with what you did, not what you were assigned
A responsibility tells the reader what your boss expected. An accomplishment tells them what happened. Compare these two lines for the same job:
Responsible for managing the company's social media accounts.
Grew the company's Instagram following from 4,000 to 19,000 in eleven months by shifting to short-form video.
The first could be written by anyone who held the title. The second could only be written by the person who did the work. Recruiters know the difference, and they hire the second person.
Start every bullet with a strong past-tense verb: built, cut, launched, negotiated, rebuilt, automated. Avoid soft openers like "assisted with" or "was involved in" unless your role really was supporting, in which case say so honestly.
Put a number on it
Numbers do two things. They make a claim verifiable, and they give the recruiter a sense of scale. "Improved customer response time" means nothing on its own. "Cut average customer response time from 14 hours to 3" tells a story in one line.
Not every bullet needs a percentage. If you genuinely cannot measure something, scale still helps: the size of the team you led, the budget you handled, the number of clients in your portfolio. A line like "managed a portfolio of 40 enterprise accounts" carries weight even with no growth figure attached.
If you are early in your career and short on metrics, count what you can. Events organised, reports produced, tickets closed per week. Small numbers beat no numbers.
Order entries by relevance, then recency
The standard is reverse-chronological: most recent job first. Keep that as your default, because recruiters expect it and a non-standard order reads as a red flag.
Within each entry, though, you control the order of the bullets. Put the bullet most relevant to the job you are applying for at the top. A backend developer applying for a role heavy on database work should not bury the database migration bullet under three lines about meetings.
Trim the old roles
Your job from twelve years ago does not need five bullets. It probably needs one, or just the title, company, and dates. The further back a role sits, the less a recruiter cares about the detail. Spend your space on the last two roles, where most of the relevant evidence lives.
A practical rule: roughly two-thirds of your work experience section should cover the last five years.
A quick way to pressure-test each bullet
Read a bullet and ask: could a colleague who held the same title write this exact sentence? If yes, it is a duty, not an achievement. Rewrite it until the answer is no.
If you are turning a LinkedIn profile into a CV, tools like Postulit can pull your roles across and give you a clean starting structure, but the rewriting from duties to results is still on you. That is the part that gets the interview.
Start with your current role. Rewrite three bullets tonight using a verb and a number. You will see the difference on the page immediately.